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Showing posts from March, 2008

Yahoo! Cross-sell bug

In a recent release, Yahoo! made it possible to show cross-sells right on the product pages. Coupled with their auto-suggest feature (where products are automatically recommended based on past shopping history) this is a great conversion feature. There is, however, a minor bug in the way these on-page cross-sells are implemented. Here is the scoop: As you may know, you can add the yahoo-generated cross-sells to your item pages by inserting <div id="ys_relatedItems"></div> anywhere in your pages' text or template. The bug occurs - in Internet Explorer only - if this ys_relatedItems div is the last child of its parent. In that case, and again, only in Internet Explorer, no cross-sell items will show up on the page. In layman's terms, this means that if you have a closing tag after <div id="ys_relatedItems</div>, then this bug will cause your cross-sells not to show. So, for example, if you have a table and inside it the last element is your ys_

Choosing your image type is now possible

With a recent feature release, Yahoo! Store finally gave us the option to choose the format in which images are generated on the template-based store editor pages. Previously, unless you displayed an image unaltered (meaning in its original size, and without manipulating it with the RENDER or FUSE operator), the Yahoo! Store editor converted images into GIFs no matter what. What is wrong with that? Well, the GIF format, while small in file size, is best for graphics or clip art, and not for photographic images. The reason lies with the fact that GIF can only display up to 256 colors. With the new release, we can now choose among GIF, JPEG, or PNG. JPEG is generally better for photos, but JPEG uses what is called a "lossy" compression - meaning that in order to reduce file size, the image is compressed by merging like pixels thereby reducing the image quality to varying degrees. PNG is a relatively new format and is generally far superior to both GIF and JPEG. PNG uses "l